Comment by gambiting | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gambiting | Hacker News Reader

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>>and entering the war against Russia is because we believe that Russian values are WRONG and only our values are RIGHT.

I genuinely believe HN is being inflitrated by Russian bots left and right(or, alternatively, that people who live far far away from the conflict somehow feel compelled to voice their opinion).

My family is housing multiple Ukrainian families of refugees - the stories of their close ones, their towns and homes being blown to pieces by Russians, of having to search for your dead relatives on empty streets, of mourning your children killed in the strikes - that's the reality. It's not about ideals or agreeing with or disagreeing with Russia.

>>Those who say "this is not my war" (me and millions and millions and millions of other Germans) should get the good, clean, warm gas from Russia.

I literally can't explain how angry your statement makes me. I think in the last century you'd happily support a certain German regime as long it made sure your house was warm in winter, right? After all, all you need to do is say "it's not my war" and suddenly any moral questions don't apply any more, right?

Here's something that makes me angry: We (as in Europe) were in a refugee crisis for a long time. And yet, many countries washed their hands clean of it - with the most demeaning and undignified rhetoric.

For instance, the majority of Polish citizens have not shown a single bit of decency towards refugees from Syria and Iraq - for decades. Almost no refugee was allowed in, and other were treated like subhumans.

Now there is a sudden sympathy for refugees - and we ALL know the true reason for it: They are white Christians.

If you'd listen to Syrians, they'd tell you the same horrible stories about war. But a good portion of Europe, especially the portion of Europe that suddenly has discovered its morality, did not listen. The hypocrisy of it all makes me angry - and I am not particularly interested in treating this war as any more - or any less - horrible than the last one.

> Now there is a sudden sympathy for refugees - and we ALL know the true reason for it: They are white Christians.

That explanation does not make sense. We are talking about Europe, after all, where xenophobia routinely targets white European Christians, because their language / culture / nationality / brand of Christianity is different.

Ukrainian refugees receive different treatment, because they are fleeing a mutual enemy. The enemy of my enemy is my friend, or something like that. It's not a matter of right and wrong or some abstract principles but that of self-interest. People in East Europe generally consider the current Russian regime a threat, and they are willing to help those facing the threat.

Sure, white European Christians, widely known to be among the primary recipients of xenophobia in Europe.

What do you think caused the World Wars?

Or, to give a more recent example, consider the discrimination East Europeans faced after their countries joined the EU and many of them immigrated to the West.

Europe is not the US. People from other European countries (and from many traditional minorities in the same country) are obviously different as soon as they start speaking. Many Europeans live outside their home country and most visit other European countries once in a while. There is a huge number of encounters between Europeans from various cultural backgrounds every day, and sometimes your background marks you as a member of an outgroup. And nobody is really excluded from that.

I think OP means that people in Europe hate each other for various reasons other than being "white christian" even if a lot of them are that. See how Romanians are treated almost anywhere in Europe, despite a lot of them being as white as they come, and Christian too. See how Poles are still perceived in a lot of places.

So yes, I actually agree with that statement - in Europe white christians will be primary recipients of xenophobia, but it's neither because they are white nor because they are christian.

> For instance, the majority of Polish citizens have not shown a single bit of decency towards refugees from Syria and Iraq - for decades. Almost no refugee was allowed in, and other were treated like subhumans.

Also worth noting that, unlike Ukrainian refugees, the Syrian and Iraq refugees are the direct result of the war that Poland and other nations waged against Iraq, destabilizing the entire area and leaving it a war zone.

Polish people in few cases did offer help to middle east refugees. But they do not want to stay in Poland. Many of them will just disappear into thin air. They want social welfare of Western Europe and are very vocal about it.

On the other hand, Ukraine is protecting us from Russia. Most men are not allowed to leave and are expected to fight if necessary. The last we can do is to provide them with weapons and take care of their families.

BTW - Poland participating in US wars is also due to fear of Russia. We need powerful ally or we will become refugees once more. In quite naive way we also saw US as a moral leader.

This is just human nature 101.

We care more about things that happen closer to us than far away, and more about people we can relate better with than people we relate worse with.

There’s no point in being mad at people housing Ukrainians for not having housed Syrians.

>>Here's something that makes me angry: We (as in Europe) were in a refugee crisis for a long time. And yet, many countries washed their hands clean of it - with the most demeaning and undignified rhetoric.

And I actually agree with you. I'm absolutely abhorred by how Poland has treated refugees in the years prior to this. Even just in weeks prior, at the Belarussian border - it was an absolute shitshow and I hated my country for it.

But at the same time, I don't think this is helpful right now in any way.

If I had to explain it right now, I wouldn't say it's because Ukrainians are white christians - I think(and this is my personal opinion) that it's because we look at what's happening in Ukraine and we recognize all the awful shit that Russia did to us in the past. Forcing Russian history and language on us? Check. Kidnapping and moving citizens deeper into Russia for "integration"? Check.

I have equal amount of stories from my own family about suffering from the hands of Nazis as I do about suffering done by the Russians.

And then on top of that - that conflict is really close to home, while the Syrian one just.....wasn't. The Russian advance to the West through Ukraine strikes fear in the Baltic states like not many other things.

I personally think Poland handled Lukashenko regime very well. There is no reason why migrants should be robbed by Belarus and then dumped into Western Europe trough Poland. Strong response discouraged more tragedies.

And don't get me wrong. We can have discussion about how many migrants from the whole world we can host in Europe. As someone with strong libertarian leanings I'm personally quite divided on it myself. But it's not up to Belarus to decide.

> They are white Christians

No, they are neighbors that speak a close language that share history and that are facing a common enemy. Nobody gives a flying shit about religion in that matter, what do you think, atheist Ukrainians are sent back to die from Russian artillery?

Syria’s far away from Europe and in reality no refugees from there have the right to protection from Europe. The EU being the moral superpower that it is helped them anyway, so I think it deserves praise, not criticism.

Well, at least deserves praise for the intensions which were good. It completely bungled the implementation and deserves all the criticism in the world for that.

> I genuinely believe HN is being inflitrated by Russian bots left and right

This is ruscism -- a revisionistic, psychopatic, hateful, denenerate, cleptocratic, idiotic, savage, uneducated fascist state.

These people have been brought so low, that the only thing left for them is to destroy everything that is not "rusian" as a last ditch cogntive action before complete implosion. The only thing keeping the russian society from imploding is the ability of Russia to brutalize others. When Russia loses this ability, all hell will break loose in Russia because all those destructive forces will turn inwards.

It is like a completely canibalistic society -- when they'll run out of outsiders to tear apart, they will tear themsevels apart.

At least in the USSR times, there were straight thinking elites, because the Party made the "mistake" of more or less letting those people be, because those did not have the ability to spread their ideas and organize.

The amount of well educated people that mostly support ruscism in Russia is staggering. This has never been the case in Russia, not during the czars, not communism.

We need to be taking this as an object lesson in the destructiveness of propaganda. So many Russian people have been so brainwashed by state propaganda over the last two-some decades that they cannot even comprehend that there's a different way.

> brainwashed by state propaganda

I know a russian woman, very well off, well travelled, well educated.

She hates Putin but is 100% supporting the invasion of Ukraine.

With the invasion of Ukraine, Putin went to the core of ruscism that unfortunately is so prevalent in Russia.

Why does she support the invasion of Ukraine then? Because she considers them to be 'our brothers that strayed'? Or because she considers them to be less than, after all, they're just hohols?

The propaganda in the last two-some decades is just the latest stage of russian propaganda against Ukraine. It started centuries ago. The czars peddled it, the soviets peddled it, now the 'federation' peddles it. Le plus ca change.

> Why does she support the invasion of Ukraine then?

Mostly because she thinks the jewish nazis were killing russians in Donbas, but that's the only thing she can articulate to someone from outside.

If I was to speculate, I'd think it's a lot more to do with a general attitude of russians that they are invincible in war and how much they've been brainwashed about WW2 about how heroic it was, how the other side was so evil and how they prevailed, that they now have a pavlovian/PTSD reaction to war -- they're in WW2 again, thus the war is just, thus Russia will prevail, thus those that kill the glorious russian soldiers are subhuman-nazi-scum-devils.

I'm sure she doesn't even realize how deeply she's affected by the propaganda.

> Mostly because she thinks the jewish nazis were killing russians in Donbas, but that's the only thing she can articulate to someone from outside.

So, state propaganda.

> If I was to speculate, I'd think it's a lot more to do with a general attitude of russians that they are invincible in war and how much they've been brainwashed about WW2 about how heroic it was, how the other side was so evil and how they prevailed, that they now have a pavlovian/PTSD reaction to war -- they're in WW2 again, thus the war is just, thus Russia will prevail, thus those that kill the glorious russian soldiers are subhuman-nazi-scum-devils.

My question before was somewhat rhetorical actually, but you managed to basically hit the nail on the head here. This is the exact attitude I encounter in many Russians of the previous generation. This is exactly how the older members of my family see it. Most of them have never had a chance to live anywhere outside of the sphere of influence of that propaganda. They have been marinading in it since the womb.

Christ what an embarassing message. Here’s a quote from Galeotti about modern Russia to help get you out of the dark place you’re in:

“According to some more hostile foreign commentators, Russia is near enough an earthly Mordor, North Korea with balalaikas. However, walk the streets of Moscow, and you’d find yourself in a modern, dynamic and frankly fun European city. Even out in the provinces, where money is tighter and the new middle class are rather thinner on the ground, there is ample evidence of change. By this I don’t just mean coffee houses, Wi-Fi and branches of Marks & Spencer (thirty-six in Russia so far), but also real debate, investigative journalism and even civil society.”

They’re normal people, just like you.

> I genuinely believe HN is being inflitrated by Russian bots left and right

Honestly that's the better and reassuring option. The alternative is that HN has many soulless humans that can't be bothered to care about a genocide next door if that means they might be inconvenienced.

I find these accusations quite interesting. There’s 150+ comments, most thoroughly following what’s the official EU/US stance and there’s probably less than 5 people here slightly diverging from that, without even supporting Russia. And then there’s two callous, but in the real world probably quite wide-spread opinion comments from this guy.

And the inevitable conclusion’s that HN was infiltrated by the Russians.

In the rush to identify and expose enemy propaganda you don’t even stop to think that the most dangerous propoaganda is the one from our own governments, which are steering us to an economic catastrophe after declaring economic war on their main energy supplier without first securing an alternative.

This framing by EU/US media and politicians is so shockingly efficient that most people on the internet at least can’t even concieve of anything else than full support, more money and more weapons for Ukraine and more sanctiona against Russia.

Winter will be very interesting indeed. We may get to see what happens when the EU moral superpower collides with the amoral reality.

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